Sunday, 5.12, is HE’s final feature-writing day before flying to France on Monday evening, and it’s hell. Okay, not that bad..but it definitely feels hellish. All of it compounded by once again submerged in a Connecticut dial-up realm that recalls memories of online adventures as I knew them in 1997 or ’98. Bizarre.

N.Y. Times guy Alan Riding asks, apparently with a straight face, if The DaVinci Code will become a hit movie. Expectations from the book and all that. The hard grim fact is that I’m going to have to finally read the damn book on the plane over to France…no, I won’t. Pink Monkey.com has all the details, all the coverage.

The U.K. Daily Mirror‘s John Hiscock, a Los Angeles-based HFPA correspondent, is claiming to have seen The DaVinci Code and has run what is apparently the first-anywhere review. (Is there another reaction somewhere that went up earlier?) In fact, Hiscock saw 35 minutes’ worth last Monday along with his fellow HFPA buffet-gobblers, and yet he has the chutzpah to file a “review” for his paper, claiming he’s the first guy to see Opie’s Dae. The Cannes website says The DaVinci Code runs two hours and 32 minutes. This means Hiscock has missed almost two hours of the film, and yet he’s saying, “I’ve seen it…here’s a review.” What he saw was basically a glorified trailer or EPK. No wonder Sony and other studios are so eager now to lob stuff over the heads of North American critics. The HFPA-ers are only too willing to trade scruples for access.

It’s a nice that “the studio indie divisions are a strong, growing business,” as Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson writes. “Oscar voters like their movies. The corporate bean counters like their economies of scale and robust global numbers. And it’s a great place to make your mark as an executive because the margin for error is not as unforgiving as it is at the major studios.” It’s a well observed piece, but I don’t really care. Stories about advancement and success aren’t as interesting as ones about failure or disaster. In fact, on some level I’d almost rather not acknowledge, they make me feel a wee bit resentful.

I’ve got this Prairie Home Companion feature I’ve been piddling around with for the last couple of days, and a big interview piece with Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu about Babel (which I’ll be running on Monday evening, a day before the start of the Cannes Film Festival), and that piece about who dies (and why) in big disaster films that’ll run on Sunday…and I can’t seem to make myself grind ’em out. It’s a bitch.

A pretty good piece by Hollywood Wiretap‘s Stephen Saito about the situation facing poor Josh Lucas , who has now starred in two huge simmer wipeouts — Poseidon and last year’s Stealth. Lucas, who was stuck on the creepy-bad-guy track for years, will have to do some fast footwork in order to erase that association. It’s a brutal world out there.

Several sources close to The DaVinci Code have told Slate columnist Kim Masters that Columbia Pictures knew that their strategy of not showing the film until next Tuesday — three days before the 5.19 opening — “might create bad buzz. If the potato isn’t rotten, people might ask, why hide the potato? That concern was well-aired in internal discussions, according to these sources. But wedged between religious foes and book fanatics, the studio concluded that the risk was worth taking.” Actually, Masters reports, exhibitors are seeing it today . Hey, if any exhibs or friends-of-exhibs hear any reactions and want to pass them along, I’m all ears.
http://www.slate.com/id/2141699/

A first-rate and very correctly-reasoned piece by the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell about the pitfalls of thoughtless rethinks and after- thoughts by way of digital manipulations — i.e., George Lucas deciding to have Greedo shoot first and Steven Spielberg putting walkie-talkies in the hands of the cops at the end of E.T. instead of rifles. I agree with Howell that digital re-do’s are fine as long as you don’t mess with the original, or, as Lucas did for way too many years, make it unavailable. The most interesting quote in the piece belongs to Harrison Ford , who told Howell when he brought up the Greedo-shoots-first issue that “you’re probably the only guy who cares about this.” That was Ford putting his cards on the table and saying in so many words, “I am out of it…I live in my own world…I don’t know anything.”

Susan Wloszczyna‘s USA Today story about movie phenome- nons winks at (but doesn’t fully acknowledge) the all-but-certain fact that Snakes on a Plane is not the next phenomenon, but is, in fact, a pheno- menon already. In the meantime, we get a bunch of half-assed definitions, recollections, and a big chart going all the way back to Porky’s. (I just tried to remember how to spell Wloszczyna’s name without looking it up, and I blew it again. It’s the most impossible-to-remember last name in the history of impossible-to-remember last names. I don’t even know how to pronounce it. Is it supposed to sound like “Vlossinya“?)

“I can’t really account for it, and I still feel it when I go [to the Cannes Film Festival,” Toronto-based director Atom Egoyan tells Toronto Star critic Geoff Pevere . “I know the [festival] like the back of my hand, and yet there’s a degree of consecration which is peculiar and distinct and quite impossible to really describe.”

This Saturday Morning Shootout video clip with Peter Bart and Peter Guber, obviously recorded last summer, has Bryan Singer confessing that Superman Returns cost more than $250 million bucks. But you’ll have to sit through nine minutes and 15 seconds of this and that first.

The S.S. Poseidon is just leaving the harbor and already it’s starting to take on water. It might make $20 million this weekend, but it’ll be off a good 50% next weekend and with DaVinci Code and X-Men 3 ruling the roost over the next two weeks, Poseidon can do nothing except sink beneath the waves. If you calculate the distribution costs as roughly $50 million (which is what my estimate is) it doesn’t even seem probable that the domestic haul will match this amount. It’s an Alan Horn disaster movie.